You can't just close your eyes, turn the dial to 350 degrees, and pull out your goods after 30 minutes. Baking is a science. There are several solvable variables that determine baking times for your cookies, cakes, and baguettes. The kitchen lab coats at Stack Exchange offer advice on oven use when your recipe is only half baked.

Answer: Find a Balance

Cooking temperature and time are determined by a number of factors. The idea is to get the inside of the product properly cooked before the outside dries out, becomes tough, or becomes unpleasantly dark or even burned. At the same time, you usually want the product to get nicely browned (adds flavor and looks nice) before the inside is overcooked. So it's about finding a balance.

Factors which influence appropriate temperature and time include:

- Ingredients: High protein ingredients (like meat or eggs) easily become tough when overcooked. High sugar or starch recipes will tend to brown or burn more easily.

- Moisture level: For some products, such as popovers or many kinds of pastry, steam is an important leavening agent, and a high temperature is called for. In other products, like cookies, one of the goals of baking is to drive off excess moisture. And in still others, moisture is absorbed into the other ingredients.

- Shape: A fat, round loaf will usually need a longer cooking time and lower temperature than a thin, flat pizza or a long, skinny baguette because it takes longer for the center of the loaf to heat up. (See how to make a cake lift equally.)

- Personal preference: At the end of the day, the most important factor is whether you like the way the product turned out. If you like a crispier crust, change the temperature and/or cooking time to suit your taste.

Any baking recipe should specify the temperature and cooking time, unless perhaps it's from a book that specifies those things for a number of recipes at once. If not, find a similar recipe and use the temperature specified there, but keep a close eye on the product during the baking process. Learn how to tell when the product is done. For cakes, go by color for the outside, and by temperature or using a toothpick or wooden skewer for the inside.

And then there's the toothpick trick (and a few alternative doneness tricks): poke a wooden toothpick into the center of a cake; if it comes out with wet batter, keep cooking; if it comes out clean and dry, it's probably overcooked; if it comes out with a few crumbs stuck to it, it's probably perfect.

Answer: It's All About Sugar

When determining baking temperature, always consider sugar content. The crust color of any baked good from cakes to breads to biscuits is a result of the caramelization of sugars on the surface of the product. The higher the sugar content, the lower the temperature should be.

For example, when I make banana bread, I bake at 350 F (177 C). If the bananas I use are very ripe (high in sugar), I knock the temperature down.

In essence, you want to make sure that the entire product bakes through before you burn the surface.

Also, a good rule of thumb is that cakes are lower temp (high in sugar)—around 325-350 F.

Yeast goods like lean french breads (yeast goods lower in sugar, that is)—you want at least 400, otherwise you get a very ugly light crust color. A higher sugar yeast product like a cinnamon roll would bake around 370.